News Releases

Identifies the Top Five Trends That Will Impact Organizations and How We Work in 2015

Dec 18, 2014 – San Mateo, CA, and Quebec City, CACoveo, the leading advanced enterprise search provider, today announced the top five trends that it predicts will increase worker and customer proficiency in 2015. Identified by Gartner as the most innovative leader in the 2014 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Search, and with more than 700 installations of its advanced enterprise search technology within mid-to large-size organizations globally, Coveo is in a singular position to predict trends that impact how we work, enabled by advanced enterprise search and relevance technology.

“In addition to our customer base, the analyst community and other technology innovations, we look to consumer Internet trends which today form one of the greatest drivers of technology trends in business,” said Laurent Simoneau, Coveo CTO and founder, “as we predict the trends we believe will be prevalent in 2015.”

The following are the top five organizational trends and their resulting “how we work” trends Coveo predicts for 2015:

1. Stop moving data: Enterprises will embrace the “ecosystem of record” over the system of record

Multiple forces are at play that accelerate data fragmentation and will require companies to recognize and embrace the ecosystem of record: applications will become even more fragmented and specialized, enterprises will favor best-of-breed technologies, the monolithic platform model will slowly die and companies will continue moving to the cloud at an accelerated clip. IT executives and business leaders will realize that the end-all-be-all “system of record” model has failed. IT organizations in 2015 will embrace the full “ecosystem of record,” defined as all of the rich legacy applications and cloud sources containing all of an organization’s work and mapping to organizational know-how. As a result they will stop trying to move data and enable dynamic information mash-up abilities, right at the point of need.

Organizations embracing the ecosystem of record will virtually consolidate information via secure, unified indexing technology, and success will require relevance, contextual accuracy, high levels of security and value for the end-user accomplishing a task.

“The costs of cloud storage and bandwidth decrease substantially year over year,” said Simoneau, “and we know that cloud adoption by businesses is growing exponentially. Yet there remain on-premise systems that may never move, or at least not until the issues of security are resolved to a standard not yet conceived. With the large platform players losing the consolidation battle, companies will virtually consolidate their ecosystem of record utilizing the secure, unified index which scales at a fraction of the cost that was possible in the past.”

How We Work Trend 1: We will stop reinventing the wheel because we can easily use information from every system, at our fingertips, and know what everyone in our organization knows.

2. Upskilling the end-user: Advanced search-based apps will make people more proficient as they work.

Skills and talent continue to be the primary constraints to organizational growth as global employment hovers close to or above the 2007, pre-downturn levels in major global economies, the rate at which skills must change continues to accelerate, and as baby-boomers continue their exodus from the workplace. Search-based apps that can inject contextually relevant information and experts into workflows at the point of need will become prevalent as they help employees become more proficient as they work and able to quickly change gears and tackle ever higher-level work. Research shows that knowledge workers currently spend most of their time redoing work and re-solving the same challenges rather than solving new challenges or working on new projects, largely because they cannot access prior work or relevant experts, or gain better insights through richer views of information as they are working.

“More proficient employees are able to address higher-level work, leaving repetitive tasks to automation,” said Louis Tetu, CEO, Coveo. “This trend will take off in 2015 as organizations enable the ecosystem of record and make all of this knowledge relevant to the individual situation and available to workers at the point of need. These apps will also be mobile in nature as browsing via mobile devices will continue to overtake traditional computer use.”

How We Work Trend 2: We will enhance our skills as we work by gaining the right knowledge exactly when we need it.

Companies will offload support capacity to today’s more competent and digitally native customer. Customers will solve even complex challenges on their own, as they prefer. Several studies have documented self-service to be a primary desire of customers; however, customers often cannot easily find the answer via self-service channels (58 percent of calls to assisted support occur after a customer tries to self-serve and fails). Companies will turn to advanced enterprise search-based apps to provide contextual, real-time assistance to customers seeking to solve issues on their own.

“More sophisticated customers, many of whom are digital natives, prefer self-service but cannot find what they need on company portals. In 2015, companies will solve this “low hanging fruit” problem with advanced search for their customer communities and portals,” said Tetu. “Enabling advanced search to provide the personal experience customers prefer will be a double win for companies because it will reduce costs and offload support capacity by tapping into the latent competence of customers, and for customers, because their satisfaction will increase when they are able to solve complex challenges when and how they want.”

How We Work Trend 3: We will empower our customers with the knowledge they need, when they need it, to solve even their toughest issues.

Mobile browsing will outpace classic computer use, creating significant accessibility gains, increasing data creation (from sensors, the Internet of Things, and smart machines) and creating challenges for traditional
applications. For Enterprise Search, this trend will drive new and ubiquitous interfaces that will provide a contextually relevant experience within smaller real estate. The right information will be proactively pushed to mobile devices based on what the individual is doing or where they are located. This will require enterprise search vendors to enable knowledge graphs, where information is stored in the form of interrelated graphs around different data entities. In order to scale, such knowledge graphs will need to be stored within an index.

“2015 will be a year when mobile interfaces will be thought of first for many applications, and advanced search apps will provide proactive knowledge and information based on both the individual’s past interaction with information and her or his current data and signals: Interest, location, etcetera,” said Simoneau.

How We Work Trend 4: We will work smarter on our smartphones and tablets, with personalized information always at our fingertips, in our context.

5. The primary security concern for information access through cloud indexes will be solved.

While security has always been a key concern of enterprise search installations on-premise, cybersecurity will become a critical concern and will be the primary gating factor for cloud-based search adoption and hybrid on-premise/cloud implementations. The threat will be magnified by mobility and the migration to cloud-based business models. Enterprise search in the cloud and hybrid strategies will only be widely adopted with high levels of proven security. Moreover, this will fix the challenge of many enterprise search installations. Without the proper security, companies will not open all of their data stores to the search application, and employees will not be able to find what they know exists.

“Today’s secure connectors, such as Coveo’s, can consolidate security models, and this will become the norm for search adoption in the cloud” said Simoneau. “Moreover, search applications will become HIPAA/PCI compliant, as are Coveo’s cloud-based analytics.”

How We Work Trend 5: We will engage with search because it shows us what we know exists—and can recommend what we didn’t know existed but matters to our work.

About Coveo

Recognized as the Most Visionary Leader in Enterprise Search by Gartner, Coveo helps organizations upskill for growth by ensuring that every employee, support agent, customer, and website visitor easily finds better and more relevant information and people—enhancing their skills for the task at hand.

Coveo's highly advanced enterprise search technology adds the value of rich content and insights to CRM, customer service applications, intranets and websites. Coveo securely connects with most legacy and cloud systems, consolidates organizations’ full ecosystems of record in real-time through secure, unified indexes, and provides unified search, dynamic 360-degree views of information, and contextual, proactive recommendations of relevant content and experts using powerful analytics.